Online Educational Technologies

A rapidly changing technological environment presents opportunities for rethinking the way liberal arts colleges deliver education, support research and scholarship, and manage themselves as organizations. College presidents play a crucial role in resolving the competing forces of organizational culture and change. While liberal arts colleges have changed before, they have not yet been "transformed" by online educational technologies, as some predicted. This study explored the contemporary phenomenon of online educational technologies from the perspectives of presidents of premier liberal arts colleges in New England. It found that these institutions have adopted online educational technologies as tools to support their model of excellent residential, liberal arts education but the presidents are uncomfortable with the content-delivery model often associated with online learning.